Introduction
This animation was created by Segolene Berthou and sent to us by Annie Schultz from the Met Office and the EUCP Project team.
“Climate models produce projections that are used to predict future changes in climate. They can help governments, businesses and other stakeholders plan to better deal with the challenges and opportunities that a changing climate brings.
EUCP (European Climate Prediction) is a research project that supports both scientists and climate information providers to produce better climate information for these users. It develops cutting-edge approaches to using climate projections, as well as providing new climate simulations, never rolled out before on a European level. For example, EUCP uses a new type of regional climate models to produce very high-resolution climate simulations over Europe. This model improves the simulation of atmospheric convection, a key process in many extreme weather events. This provides a new level of detail and robustness to climate projections needed by users, such as cities planning for future flood risk.
This animation shows a high resolution simulation of a storm, a small portion of what the High resolution regional climate model in EUCP can produce.
Climate models are a set of equations that are solved all over the globe at grid points which are about 100km apart. However, if you imagine a thunderstorm cloud, it is much smaller than 100km: it can sometimes rain on a village and not on the next one a few kilometres apart. The top panel is a regional very high resolution model (2.2km) plugged into a global model (25km resolution). This means the equations are solved every 2.2km in the top panel (only inside the white frame) and every 25km in the bottom panel. The top panel can therefore better simulate showers and thunderstorms. This event is a storm with a large band of rainfall associated with a cold front and showers forming after the front (on the left side of the rain band). We can already see stark differences in the way both models represent showers. The bottom panel shows them as light rain everywhere (uniform green/yellow colour), whereas the top panel depicts them as stronger and intermittent showers, which are more realistic (the ‘blue dots’ everywhere). Another difference is thunderstorms in the Mediterranean, shown as more intense in the high resolution model (reaching red colours near Corsica/Italy/Greece).
This storm never happened in reality, it is a synthetic one: no observations are ingested in the model so it runs freely and generates a present-day like set of weather situations.
Thanks to BellHouse, you can now listen to this stormy weather while staying dry!”
Initial Testing
This recording is BellHouse playing the EUCP High resolution model looped 5 times. It has been flipped on to it’s side to fit the aspect ratio of the sampler, in order to capture as many bells as possible. The sampling threshold is 1 and the interval is 2 seconds. Initally the sample is set at a grid of 7×4 but after 2 plays in the loop it is reset to 7×5 (35).
This is the animation recorded as a Quicktime Movie but played the right way up.
The following two films are of the top and bottom of the animation played separately to see how they sound.
Here you can see there are some black areas where there is no information recorded. This is something we are working on and has to do with the way that the broadcast software operates, leaving a margin to the left. We can also see that at the bottom of the animation, not much colour change occurs, so the bells on the left hand side of the video do not get played in the film much, if at all.
Most of the sound centres on the middle section of the bells, though as there is quite a lot of activity at the very top, there is enough here to play the bells to the right as well.
In the film, which is 6 loops of the animation, I have also changed the sampling threshold half way through after 3 loops of the film. It started at sampling threshold 1 and moved to 2. I felt that initially BellHouse was p[laying quite a lot of the bells and it might be useful to hear a bit less to hear the patterns more. Also it illustrates how changing the variables can influence how BellHouse sounds quite significantly.
The last film of this sequence shows the bottom half of the animation played in the same manner. That is 6 loops of the animation with the same settings for continuity.
